The Premonition: A Pandemic Story Highlight

The pattern continued right through the pandemic: the Trump administration would claim with fanfare that supplies were on their way to the states and leave it to the career civil servants whose job was to interact with state officials to reap the humiliation when those supplies failed to arrive. It would happen again with ventilators, with the drug Remdesivir, and, finally, with vaccines. Among other consequences of the White House’s strategy was that it gutted the credibility of the career federal officials.